This disclosure relates generally to refrigerant recovery systems for refrigeration systems, and more particularly to an apparatus and method for providing increased accuracy in determining respective amounts of refrigerant and oil recovered during service of an air conditioning system by taking into account the quantity of dissolved refrigerant in oil recovered from the system.
Air conditioning systems are currently commonplace in homes, office buildings and a variety of vehicles including, for example, automobiles. In order to maintain the overall efficiency and efficacy of an air conditioning system, the refrigerant included therein may be periodically replaced or recharged. Portable carts, also known as recover, recycle, recharge (“RRR”) refrigerant service carts or air conditioning service (“ACS”) units, are used in connection with servicing refrigeration circuits of air conditioning systems, including retrieving refrigerant from the air conditioning system. The portable machines include hoses coupled to the refrigeration circuit to be serviced.
Some air conditioning systems include a mechanical compressor that requires oil to properly function. During normal operation of the air conditioning system, a portion of the oil from the compressor is entrained in the refrigerant and circulated through the air conditioning system. During servicing of the air conditioning system, the oil entrained refrigerant from the air conditioning system is drained into an ACS unit, where the oil is separated from the refrigerant during a recycling/purification process. The recovered, separated oil is then drained from the ACS unit into a bottle so that it can be determined how much oil needs to be injected back into the air conditioning system. Replacement of an accurate quantity of the oil lost to entrainment with new oil, as well as accurate replacement of the quantity of recovered refrigerant is important to ensure proper and efficient operation of the air conditioning system.
In some conventional service methods, refrigerant dissolved in the oil was not accounted for when measuring the amounts of refrigerant and oil recovered, leading to inaccuracy in the measured amounts, and thus inaccuracy in the amount of oil supplied to the compressor and refrigerant supplied to the system during system service.
It would therefore be desirable to provide an ACS unit having improved accuracy in determining the amount of refrigerant and the amount of oil recovered during service of an air condition system.